Make it Easy For Your Customers to Buy

Tonight I made a trip to Bed Bath and Beyond.  It’s not a store that I visit frequently…in fact I can’t remember the last time I’ve been there.  My friend is getting married in a few days, and they registered wedding gifts there.  Now I didn’t have a bad experience there, but what should have taken me 10-15 minutes turned into a 40 minute affair.

I didn’t even mind that the cashier couldn’t figure out how to work the printer for the gift registry (she got all red and embarrassed when the tech guy finally came over after about 5 minutes of awkward silence and me asking random questions and showed her that all she needed to do was put paper into it.)  This was actually pretty entertaining.

What did bother me was after I was given the 4 page print-out of gifts, I was on my own to search through the mountains of kitchen utensils and bedroom accessories to find my friends’ favorite stuff.  The problem is the merchandise is stacked all the way up to the 25 foot ceilings, and there are 5 different brands for anything you could possibly think of.  To make a long story short, it took me forever to find the stainless steel spoons and multi-purpose cutting boards that I was looking for.

Couldn’t Bed Bath and Beyond mark location on their registry print outs just like a library or bookstore would do?  If I knew the spoons were in section “A6″ or simply “Utensils” it would be so much easier than going to the kitchen area of the store.  On my print-out I would automatically see where I need to go based on the gifts that I want.  It’s not like technology or organization is a problem for Bed Bath and Beyond…they have a massive (and very efficient) gift registry system that spans the entire country.  This type of system is needed more at Bed Bath and Beyond than most other stores.  During my chat with the printer-challenged cashier I asked her how much of their business is through gift registries.  She said it was about 75%.  That’s huge!  So that means 75% of the people are coming into the store trying to find specific items on a list and they’re not interested in browsing for things that they personally like best.  It’s not a big deal to browse when you’re looking for yourself, but when you’re looking to buy an item for your friend that they’ve already picked out you want to get right to it.

Maybe the confusion is by design.  Bed Bath and Beyond wants you to have to search for gifts so that hopefully you come across something you want yourself.  But honestly, I felt intimidated and overwhelmed searching through those aisles.  I kept thinking how I wasn’t looking forward to picking out items for my own wedding this summer (although I did find a few cool things that I definitely wouldn’t mind having!)

Will I go back to Bed Bath and Beyond?  Probably, because I’ll have more friends getting married, and I might need something once I get my own home.  Am I looking forward to going back?  No, because it’s really overwhelming.

Make it easy for your customers that are looking for something specific to find it quickly and get out.  It will make their experience so much more pleasant.  Are there any other compnaies that have this same problem?